Supposedly magic words only exist in fairy tales, but that’s not true at all. Consider a word we hear often in the real world, which, if uttered, has the power to make otherwise strong men quiver and lose their manhood. Well, at least certain men anyway. And just what is that word? Maybe you’ve guessed it by now: RACIST.

If you don’t believe it, just throw the word at any average group of white folks and watch them grovel. And it doesn’t matter what their views on race might be. Just say the word as an accusation and observe them cower and placate. Seldom, even in fairy tales, did wizards wield such influence with their incantations.

This magic, of course, only works on white folks. According to our lords of political correctness, people of color (once known as colored people) cannot be racists. The reason is that they have no power, this despite the fact that they possess the power of a magic word-not to mention a host of well-funded advocacy groups to promote their interests.

The mystical might of the R-word is so great, and the fear it inspires so great, that reason and logic seemingly can do little to blunt its force. For example, try to explain to a white person under its thrall that “racism” is a term of propaganda invented by the communist Leon Trotsky to denigrate racial and ethnic groups resisting communism. Also explain, that the word, when directed against white people, equates a benign and natural love for one’s own people with genocidal hatred, the latter illustrated in most white people’s minds with media programmed images of Klansmen, lynching nooses, homicidal rednecks, and Nazi death camps.

Now see what kind of reaction you get. For a moment the person you’re speaking with may show some understanding, but then the force of the magic often will return, and he may even accuse you of “hate speech,” (another incantation) for trying to raise such issues. For whites under the magic, the only way to prove you’re not a racial hater is to hate your race.

Is there any way to break this spell? We should never give up on logic and facts. Faith calls us to hope that simple truth eventually will prevail. In the meantime, some other approaches may be helpful. One is a counter-spell suggested, ironically, by Saul Alinsky a true wizard of social manipulation who commonly cast the R-word against whites for his purposes.

Alinsky advised that an effective defense against people trying to control you is the use of mockery, flippancy and ridicule. These thrusts, he advised, are hard to counter. So, to use this advice against the likes of Alinsky, let’s consider some creative replies to the charge, “You are a racist.” 1) Yes, I am. I run 10K races all the time. 2) Well, isn’t everyone? 3) No, I’m not. I respect all races, even my own. 4) What are you, a race card shark? Deal me out of your stacked deck. I’m not playing your game. 5) There you go, off to the races again.

Be creative. Be bold. Remember: the magic will subside when you don’t take the magic word seriously.

Doctor D made an excellent post under the “farm protection weekend” post. Please read. Whites around the world are being Zimbabweed, and in the Forced Union, we are also being Bosniaed and Mexicoed. The White Genocide side, has raised the Black Flag shouting, No Quarter! Whites will be given, No Quarter.

Well, we at LITM, aint kneeling before their ditch.

Christus Victor!

Oh, and from SouthAfricaZimbabweWashington,DC, 2007 a.d. The template the U.S. Congress Reparation Machine will be using in our near future.

S. Africa seizes first farm in reform drive

Reuters

Johannesburg: South Africa, under pressure to redress land ownership imbalances left by apartheid, has expropriated its first farm in a reform drive aimed at returning land to the black majority, officials said yesterday.

The state-ordered sale of a farm in Northern Cape province marks a new phase in the contentious issue in South Africa, where the government has come under fire for moving too slowly to put land in black hands.

More than a decade after the end of apartheid, over 90 per cent of farmland is still owned by the white elite. Until now, the government has moved cautiously, careful not to rattle investor nerves given the chaos that accompanied a similar land redistribution process in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

But the government has recently hardened its stance, and officials said they would use the full power of post-apartheid laws which allow government to order land sales to speed up the process.

The first expropriation took effect on January 26, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said in a statement.

“I think it [the expropriation] is most significant. … It [reform] is something that cannot lag forever,” said Susan Booysen, a political scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand.

“The nitty-gritty of each individual case is an incredible mine field government has to go through.”

Restitution is part of South Africa’s broader land reform programme and allows blacks, many of whom were evicted from ancestral lands, to apply to have their rights restored or to ask for financial compensation.

South Africa …

and the shooting has

already started

Only 70 miles from a 2010 World Cup football stadium, a farmer’s wife and a boy aged 13 learn to defend themselves with lethal weapons. They say thousands of white landowners have been killed by Zimbabwe-style marauders; their black rulers accuse them of belligerence and right-wing tendencies. Aidan Hartley reports on the war of words you won’t read about in your World Cup holiday brochure.

Farmers’ wives learn how to defend themselves on a farm-attack prevention course near the Zimbabwean border in South Africa

Bella wakes. She hears a strangled, gurgling sound. It’s the dog, she thinks.

‘Peter, there’s something wrong,’ she says to her husband. Noises emerge from the room of her mother-in-law, who’s 98 and confined to a wheelchair.

It’s 1am. Bella gets up and walks out of the bedroom. In the hall she sees a young man who at first she thinks is her son. Except he’s black, wears a balaclava and is pointing a gun at her.

‘He comes for me,’ says Bella, her hand before her tear-stained face.

‘He’s going to shoot me! I trip as I run back to the bedroom. Peter comes to the door but he has nothing in his hand, no pistol. I hear a gun go off. I hear my mother-in-law screaming. I lock the door and telephone my son. I tell him: “I think they shot Pa!”‘

Two men are outside the bedroom window with a rifle. She loads the pistol Peter keeps by the bed.

‘I take the gun and say, “Come on! I’ll shoot you!”‘

Back in the hall she finds Peter dead, a trail of blood across the kitchen floor. Her mother-in-law Gerda is bruised and beaten.

‘I can’t tell you how hopeless I felt,’ Bella says. ‘I will see it in front of me for weeks, months, years.’

Vet’s son Barend Harris (right), 13, learns to shoot

Days after Peter is cremated, the attackers return. The survivors are sleeping elsewhere by now, so the gang finds only the dogs in the house. They torture the animals with boiling water before soaking them in petrol and setting them on fire.

I ask Bella for a motive and she says a group of black South Africans who are squatting on their farmland have repeatedly threatened them.

After the family find the dogs, Bella’s son Piet calls the police. Weeks later the attackers are still at large; police arrested one man in connection with the killing but he was later released.

I am in her home. The bullet holes are still clearly visible. I ask her what she is going to do.

‘If we stay here they will kill us. You can’t say this was a dream, or rewind what happened. They want our land.’

This is Bella’s account of an attack that happened last month in South Africa, in the north-east of the country. Her home is a long way from the vineyards and beaches of Cape Town, but South Africa is to host the 2010 World Cup and five of the centres for players and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who will come with them are here in the north.

Preparations are in hand but this is against the backdrop of a country gripped by ultra-violence. Officially there are about 50 murders a day, and three times that number of rapes. Most victims are poor blacks in South Africa’s cities: reported deaths last year totalled more than 18,000.

But among the casualties of the violence are white farmers, whose counterparts in Zimbabwe are singled out for international press coverage; here in the ‘rainbow nation’ their murders, remarkable for their particular savagery, go largely unreported.

Farmer’s wife Ida Nel learns how shoot an AK-47 and a pistol on a ‘farm protection weekend’

There are no official figures but, since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, farmers’ organisations say 3,000 whites in rural areas have been killed. The independent South African Human Rights Commission, set up by Mandela’s government, says the number is 2,500.

Its commission’s report into the killings does not break down their figures by colour; but it says the majority of attacks in general – ie where no one necessarily dies – are against white people and that ‘there was a considerably higher risk of a white victim of farm attacks being killed or injured than a black victim.’

It states that since 2006, farmer murders have jumped by 25 per cent and adds: ‘The lack of prosecutions indicates the criminal justice system is not operating effectively to protect victims in farming communities and to ensure the rule of law is upheld.’

I have lived and worked in Africa for 20 years, reporting from countries all across the continent. I know that the truth is very hard to find here. Stereotypes are everywhere. Blacks give no credit to successful white businesses. Whites give no credit to the black populace, refusing stubbornly to acknowledge that they themselves are physical reminders of a brutal colonial past.

What is certain is this: since the mid-Nineties, 900,000 mainly white South Africans have emigrated from South Africa – about 20 per cent of the white population – most of them due to soaring crime rates. In an eerie parallel with Zimbabwe, farms have been reclaimed by unqualified workers.

The police say don’t fight back. You must fight. It’s the bullet or be slaughtered

Commercial agricultural production has taken a massive hit where land reform has occurred. And as the attacks on white farmers continue, the police seem increasingly powerless and ineffective, and farmers are turning to vigilante behaviour as their way of life comes under violent assault.

The ANC government’s response to this has been largely defiant. As Charles Ngacula, Safety and Security Minister under the previous administration of Thabo Mbeki, said: ‘They can continue to whinge until they’re blue in the face, be as negative as they want to, or they can simply leave this country.’

Ida Nel is learning to shoot an AK-47 and a pistol on a ‘farm protection weekend’. The course is being held only 70 miles from the 2010 World Cup venue of Polokwane. Ida is married to farmer Andre. They farm guavas and macadamia nuts near Levubu in Limpopo province.

Sonette Selzer a violinist, on her farm near Ermelo. She is trained to use a variety of guns and always carries a rifle over a shoulder and a pistol on her belt

‘I’m used to guns,’ she says. ‘My dad taught me how to use one when I was a kid but I need to get confident and to know what warning signs to look out for in a farm attack.’

On the course with her are farmers, and their wives and children. Among the children is 13-year-old Barend Harris, the son of a vet, who brought his family 9mm gun. Those taking part in the weekend courses for about 50 people at a time learn to leopard-crawl with a gun and are taught self-defence (with knives and guns), how to look for signs that their homes are being targeted, bush tracking and how to shoot from a moving vehicle. They are given target practice with AK-47s, pistols, R4 and R5 assault rifles and 308 hunting rifles.

Driving around Mpumalanga Province, east of Johannesburg, in what used to be the Transvaal, I found myself called by the farmers to a string of grisly murder scenes. In some the blood was still drying on the furniture or the street. In others, witnesses gave me accounts of killings involving rituals of extreme brutality: of victims boiled alive, forced to kneel and shot execution style and tortured in ways so unimaginable they are too horrendous to print. The same goes for the many pictures I have been shown of the barely identifiable corpses and horrific crime scenes.

Sonette Selzer, who lives on a forestry holding with her husband Werner, has made sure that she and her two boys are weapons-trained. At home in Mpumalanga province, Sonette, who is a trained medic, claims she usually gardens with a pistol at her side and a rifle strapped to her back. She is fully armed as I arrive – rather conveniently, I think.

‘It’s very tiring but even in the garden you have to be alert to what’s happening around you all the time. You can never, ever relax your guard,’ she says.

When she hears of a man who got into a gunfight with three robbers she shakes her head: ‘I’d hate to get into that situation. You need to finish it quickly.’

She gestures to her vicious-looking Ninja knives and I realise the chilling intent behind her words – you need to finish ‘them’ as quickly as possible.

She says she and Werner sleep in separate beds at either end of the house, with their guns and knives within easy reach. Their children Francois, 18, and Jaques, 16, are at boarding school in the nearby town.

‘When they were very small they learned how to use guns and how to reload,’ Sonette says of her boys.

Each dawn and evening the Selzers check in on the VHF radio with other members of the Farm Watch organisation, neighbours whom they find more reliable than the South African Police Service (SAPS). The couple are heavily armed, but what good will that do them if a group of attackers assault the house in the dead of night? The home is an ill-fortified outpost 40 minutes’ drive from the nearest Farm Watch neighbours or SAPS station that could respond in the event of an attack.

And at the farmers’ houses I visited, when grace was said at table, a semi-automatic rifle or pistol with extra magazines was prominently on display. (Once again, it’s hard to say if they are just placed there for effect.)

Werner is adamant that only he can protect his family: ‘The police say don’t fight back. But you must fight back. It’s the bullet or be slaughtered. If you’re going to rape my wife and kill my children you must understand I have nothing to lose. But you can run away. And if I shoot back you will run away.’

Since the 19th century, Boer farmers were organised into farm militias known as Commandos. These defended rural communities from assault and, just over a century ago, they formed the vanguard of the rebellion against the hated British Empire.

‘We kept the British busy until they killed our women and children in the concentration camps,’ one man told me. The two Boer wars were as much of a catastrophe in their minds as the crisis now facing them.

‘The Afrikaner Boer doesn’t like war but we will fight if we have to – and the Africans are scared of us.’

Such right-wing sentiments have done the Boers no favours under the ANC, which suspected them of links to white extremist groups such as the neo-fascist AWB. In recent years the government has moved to disband the Commando units as part of a security plan to improve policing nationwide.

The Commandos had been accused of brutality towards black farm workers; indeed, there have been reports of belligerence and abuse by white farmers, leading to a sense of reciprocity about some of the recent attacks.

Danzel Van Zyl, a senior researcher at the Human Rights Commission, says: ‘There is a feeling among black people that many white people have not come to the party yet. Reconciliation has only come from one side, and this is felt especially with regard to the farming communities. They are perceived to be conservative, with a block of them voting right-wing and for parties like (the ultra-right wing) Freedom Front Plus.

‘Old ways still play out in a lot of rural South Africa, where you will see farmers keeping the seat next to them in their truck for their dog, while workers sit in the back. A lot of farmers were killed by disgruntled farm workers who had been maltreated by them.’

Even in the garden you have to be alert to what’s happening around you

He adds: ‘The increase in farm murders is also due to the removal of the Commando system. They were notorious and feared by farm workers. But the problem is, nothing came in place of them.’

He insists there is no concerted political campaign to drive out white farmers; but all parties agree on one thing: land ownership is the burning issue.

Twenty years after the end of apartheid, whites still own about three-quarters of the country’s agricultural land. The ANC has sought to redistribute land to black South Africans by legal means. In this it has followed a radically different path to that of Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where the rule of law collapsed in the last decade as gangs of state-sponsored thugs drove off 6,000 white families.

The family of murdered farmer Nico Boonzaier at his funeral

In Mpumalanga, black South Africans are lodging hundreds of legal ‘land claims’ in which they must prove their rights to property based on family historical records. The land claims are adjudicated in court and, if successful, the state buys out white farmers at what the property owners themselves told me was a fair price.

But as a tribe of farmers, the Boers are resisting the loss of their land because, they say, it spells the end of a way of life for a community.

And this is what they claim has sparked bloody violence that they say is politically motivated all the way to the top of the ANC. The TAU, or Transvaal Agricultural Union, draws a link between land claims and attacks.

‘When there is a farm claim I say “Look out!” because attacks may follow to scare the farmers,’ says TAU regional director Piet Kemp.

This after all is the country where the President, Jacob Zuma, used as his election campaign song an old war chant from his days in the ANC’s military wing, Mshini wami – ‘Bring me my machine-gun’. And where YouTube posts include footage of Mandela singing another song, ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer’.

Mugabe may be a pariah across the world but in South Africa he has long been given standing ovations and rapturous applause at ANC events.

Widow Tracey Pemberton is 41 but looks 20 years older and appears to be malnourished. She dreams of emigrating to the UK but her British husband died five years ago and she lives on a 200-hectare farm in a ramshackle cottage. The area, set among huge forests of planted pine, is so dangerous that on the main road outside Tracey’s gate there are big signs that warn CRIME ALERT – NO STOPPING!

‘I’m stupid to stay but I don’t know where to go,’ she says. ‘It’s awful to have to say “Who’s that over there? What’s that noise?” I definitely want to go. Because you’re a woman and alone they take advantage of you. My husband had a British passport when he passed away. He’d had enough of struggling and failing in this country…’

By the eve of the elections that brought Zuma to power earlier this year the family had already been robbed six times over the years. Then one night Tracey was woken by noises from her mother Yvonne’s room. She found a man sitting on top of the 65-year-old woman. ‘I can’t get that picture out of my mind.’

The attacker stabbed her mother 17 times, but miraculously she survived. Sonette Selzer rushed to the scene to help save her. But, insists Tracey, the harrassment continues. ‘They switch on all the taps outside in the middle of the night to try to persuade you to go outside.’ And she thinks they climb about on the roof, although it could be the branches from the oak tree brushing against the tiles.

My visit to Mpumalanga came immediately after crossing the frontier from Zimbabwe and what struck me was how similar the landscapes were after redistribution had taken place. Once productive maize fields now grow only weeds. Citrus orchards are dying, their valuable fruit rotting on the branches. Machinery lies about rusting. Irrigation pipes have been looted and farm sheds are derelict and stripped of roofing. Windbreak trees have been hacked down and roads are potholed.

Few of those being resettled on former white farms are qualified to work them. Commercial properties are becoming slums where the poor live a hand-to-mouth existence in mud huts, surrounded by subsistence patches of maize. Meanwhile, black workers are put out of their jobs without compensation.

‘Now we are in big trouble,’ says Messina, a black foreman at what was Figtree farm.

He says his employers had to sell, ‘because their lives were in danger, definitely. This place is not safe any more.’

Messina says the land resettlement on his employers’ property was orchestrated by black elite figures from town, not people close to the land.

‘If you look at them they are driving smart cars. They want to look big in their four-by-fours. They say they will help us – but nothing. No job. We are suffering.’

For all South Africa’s aims to be following the rule of law, there are comparisons here with Zimbabwe and other calamitous reforms under the banner of ‘Africa for the Africans’.

‘I saw people with heads cut off, horrible things,’ says farmer Ockert van Niekerk as he sits his toddler daughter on his lap at home.

‘The aim is to scare white people. The attacks are not just crimes. They’re political. You don’t wait for a farmer for eight hours, kill him and steal a frozen chicken. In warfare you learn to soften the target, and the aim is to break us mentally and spiritually.’

But he then tells, in alarming detail, how he would respond to an attacker: ‘I will cut in seconds all the main arteries: the neck, gut and groin.’ He whips out two knives from either pocket. ‘I feel quite safe with these.’

What the farmers dub ‘hit squads’ are well armed with AK-47s, deploy in gangs and if they are ever arrested they are allegedly found to be from outside the district – ‘recruited’, the farmers say, from cities hundreds of kilometres away.

At a farmers’ day, or Boerdag, in a marquee tent surrounded by maize harvesting machinery, I meet a string of farmers with attack stories. One elderly man too scared to be identified tells me how a gang broke in at five in the morning, tied him and his wife up, then got an angle grinder from the workshop and sawed into the flesh of his legs with the blade, demanding, ‘I want money! You must talk!’

One of the gang picked up the couple’s mobile phone and inadvertently called their daughter, who then had to endure hearing the robbery unfold in screams and shouts.

The more brutal and incredible the stories, the more doubt creeps in: are they over-egging this for political impact? Are they perhaps deeply racist at heart? But then I remind myself: I have seen the pictures and read the local newspaper reports. I’ve been to the funerals.

It is said that the signs always lead down a road to the farmstead: bunches of long grass knotted like corn dolls, the strands of wire fences twisted into cat’s cradle configurations, and stones, tin cans and plastic bags stacked in circle and arrow patterns.

These ‘attack signs’, which can supposedly warn if trouble is coming to your farm, are a macabre coded language. Farmers widely believe in their existence; they have been decoded by Special Forces veterans.

At first I wondered if the ‘attack signs’ story was a result of mass hysteria. But the hairs on the back of my neck stood rigid when I began to see what appeared to be sets of signs outside farms near where attacks had already occurred.

Each sign is said to mean something: a forked stick signifies a woman in the house, the corn dolls map out the farm buildings and signs dubbed ‘triggers’ are set to either ‘off’ or ‘on’ – meaning ‘attack’.

White farmers read these runes and arm themselves because they have nothing else. New police units promised to substitute the old Commando system have yet to be formed. And people isolated on remote properties are worried by the fact that licenses for their firearms are not being renewed.

Two young men suspected of being involved in the murder of a white farmer in the North West province are arrested

As a South African Police Service (SAPS) officer, Derek Jonker investigated 52 separate farm attacks and he says, ‘There has been a decline in the abilities of the police. There is a power struggle in the police and investigators are not qualified.

‘Crime prevention has collapsed totally,’ he adds. ‘And cops tracking cases lack experience and resources to gather evidence and arrest oenders. Dockets vanish and criminals get let out of jail.’

In the provincial town of Ermelo, I meet a policeman who’s tired and angry. He says SAPS can’t be bothered to fight crime any more. Only four out of 16 police vehicles at the station are still in working order. I ask what happens with the vehicles that are in working order. He shrugs and points across the street to Ermelo’s main supermarket. And there they are: four police prowlers parked in a row. The police are inside doing their shopping while at a street corner crime scene that we’ve just come from, the blood still glistens wetly in the sunshine.

And at that murder scene I met another police officer who dismisses the idea that the ANC was involved in a conspiracy against white farmers.

It is much worse than that for South Africa as a whole, ‘It’s worse among the black people – all those rapes and killings,’ he says. ‘I feel sorry for these people. Everybody suffers, not just white people.

‘You can buy an AK for a bag of maize meal. This causes hatred between blacks and whites – and this is boiling up to what? Every time it’s very emotional because it’s black against white, but you must think with your head and not your heart.’

As we talk I’m looking at the blood on the ground. It’s the policeman’s brother-in-law who just got shot.

‘The whole criminal system is a balls-up for white and black people,’ he says. ‘We just don’t need this.’

South Africa’s proposed new law and order plans include better policing for those urban areas expecting visitors during the World Cup next year. It will be the most heavily policed World Cup in history, with 200,000 specially recruited officers and equipment ranging from surveillance cameras to water cannon.

But it will remain unnerving for those who travel that these brutal killings are happening within just a couple of hours’ drive.

Some say they wanna take my guns away
They will find to rue that day… yes they will

Blame it on the villain in the streetTruth is they wanna heard us like sheep

Come on, bring it on
Just getting started, I ain’t done
Come on, bring it on
Step right up and get yourself some
Come on, bring it on
Seen you before, ain’t gonna run
Come on, bring it on
Standin’ right here, come get you some

Come on, bring it on
Just getting started, I ain’t done
Come on, bring it on
Step right up and get yourself some
Come on, bring it on
Seen you before, ain’t gonna run
Come on, bring it on
Standin’ right here, come get you some

I remember real clear, years ago in the swamps of South Georgia
Cane pole and Crossman in my hands was all I need to be growed up
Home made ice cream and BBQ and the family on Friday nights
Ten lane ramp on Saturday right before the morning light

There came a time I’s old enough and learned about the gun
And every night at suppertime I’d answer to what I’d doneFolks today plum forgot about the way it used to be
Got no respect and no cold steel, just games on TV

And I’ll burn in hell before I sell my rights away from me
It’s high time we embrace the tool that keeps all men free

Come on and get you some
Come on
Come on and get you some
Come on
Come on and get you some today

Come on and get you some
Come on
Come on and get you some
Come on
Come on and get you some tonight

WASHINGTON – Six Indian tribes that officially disappeared during Virginia’s Jim Crow era are on the verge of official recognition again.

Some of the names may sound familiar because rivers are named after them in the D.C. area: The Chickahominy, the Rappahannock, the Monacan, the Nansemond and the Mattaponi. The sixth tribe is the eastern division of the Chickahominy.

There are only about 2,500 people who are now members of these tribes. The U.S. House voted to recognize them again, giving the six tribes the same rights as 562 other Indian tribes across the country.

But there is one exception because of concerns about gambling. “Even if the state, Virginia, starts up gambling casinos, the Indian tribes are not allowed to do that.” says Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA). Moran, who pushed through the bill, says it also righted a wrong by wiping out the damage done by state laws in the 1920’s. The Jim Crow laws erased any reference to the tribes and classified the members as “colored.” The laws made it illegal for anyone in Virginia to call themselves “Native American”. …

Walter Ashby Plecker, the first registrar of Virginias Bureau of Vital Statistics, starting in 1912, forced Indians to classify themselves as black. The tribes, he said, had become a mongrel mixture. Courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch

Lacy Branham Hearl closes her eyes and travels eight decades back to what began as a sweet childhood.

There was family everywhere: her parents, five siblings, nine sets of adoring aunts and uncles and more cousins than she could count. They all lived in a Monacan Indian settlement near Amherst, their threadbare homes circling apple orchards at the foot of Tobacco Row Mountain.

As Hearl grew, however, she sensed the adults were engulfed in deepening despair. When she was 12, an uncle gathered his family and left Virginia, never to see her again. Other relatives scattered in rapid succession, some muttering the name Plecker.

Soon, only Hearls immediate family remained. Then the orchards began to close because there were not enough workers and the townspeople turned their backs and all that was left was prejudice and plight and Plecker.

Hearl shakes her head sadly.

I thought Plecker was a devil, she says. Still do.

Walter Ashby Plecker was the first registrar of Virginias Bureau of Vital Statistics, which records births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next 34 years, he led the effort to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic genocide.

He worked with a vengeance.

Plecker was a white supremacist and a zealous advocate of eugenics a now discredited movement to preserve the integrity of white blood by preventing interracial breeding. Unless this can be done, he once wrote, we have little to hope for, but may expect in the future decline or complete destruction of our civilization.

Pleckers icy efficiency as racial gatekeeper drew international attention, including that of Nazi Germany. In 1943, he boasted: Hitlers genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.

Plecker retired in 1946 at the age of 85 and died the following year. The damage lives on.

From the grave, Plecker is frustrating the efforts of Virginia tribes to win federal recognition and a trove of accompanying grants for housing, health care and education. One of the requirements is that the tribes prove their continuous existence since 1900. Plecker, by purging Indians as a race, has made that nearly impossible. Six Virginia tribes are seeking the permission of Congress to bypass the requirement.

It never seems to end with this guy, said Kenneth Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi. You wonder how anyone could be so consumed with hate.

Its likely that Plecker didnt see himself as the least bit hateful. Had he not been so personally aloof, he might have explained that he believed he was practicing good science and religion. Perhaps he would have acknowledged that he was influenced by his own heritage.Walter Plecker was one of the last sons of the Old South. He was born in Augusta County on April 2, 1861. Ten days later, the cannons at Fort Sumter sounded the start of the Civil War. His father, a prosperous merchant and slave owner, left home to fight for the Confederate Army with many of his kin.

Some 60 years later, Plecker would recall his early days in a letter to a magazine editor expressing his abhorrence of interracial breeding. He remembered being largely under the control of a faithful slave named Delia. When the war ended, she stayed on as a servant. The Pleckers were so fond of her that they let her get married in their house. When Pleckers mother died in 1915, it was Delia who closed her eyes, he wrote.

Then Plecker got to his point. As much as we held in esteem individual negroes this esteem was not of a character that would tolerate marriage with them, though as we know now to our sorrow much illegitimate mixture has occurred. Plecker added, If you desire to do the correct thing for the negro race inspire (them) with the thought that the birth of mulatto children is a standing disgrace.

Plecker graduated from Hoover Military Academy in Staunton in 1880. He became a doctor, graduating from the University of Marylands medical school in 1885. He moved around western Virginia and the coal fields of Alabama before settling in Hampton in 1892.

Plecker took special interest in delivering babies. He became concerned about the high mortality rate among poor mothers and began keeping records and searching for ways to improve birthing.

Public health was first being recognized as a government concern at the turn of the last century, and Plecker was a pioneer. In 1902, he became health officer for Elizabeth City County (today, Hampton). He recorded details of more than 98 percent of the births and deaths in the county an amazing feat during a time when most people were born and died at home. When lawmakers established the state Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912, they asked Plecker to run it.

Pleckers first 12 years on the job were groundbreaking and marked by goodwill. He educated midwives of all races on modern birthing techniques and cut the 5 percent death rate for black mothers almost in half. He developed an incubator a combination of a laundry basket, dirt, a thermometer and a kerosene lamp that anyone could make in an instant. Concerned by a high incidence of syphilitic blindness in black and Indian babies, he distributed silver nitrate to be put in the eyes of newborns.

Plecker was all work. He did not seek friendship. Although married most of his life, he did not have children. He listed his hobbies as books and birds.

He was a man you could sometimes respect and admire, but never love, said Russell E. Booker Jr., who grew up in Pleckers neighborhood, delivered his newspaper and worked in the Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1960 to 1994, spending the last 12 years as director. He was a very rigid man, Booker added. I dont know of anyone who ever saw him smile.

Plecker was tall, bone-thin, had wavy, white hair that was neatly combed and a trim mustache. He took a bus to work and lunched every day on just an apple.

He was a miserly taskmaster. Plecker scraped glue pots, mixed the gunk with water and sent it back to employees for use. Booker said that, according to office legend, You didnt get a new pencil until you turned in your old one, and it better not be longer than an inch and a quarter.

Plecker never looked before crossing streets. He just expected the cars to stop for him, said Booker, who still lives in Richmond. One time a woman grabbed him just as he was about to be hit, and he laid her out like shed just touched God.

Plecker was a devout Presbyterian. He helped establish churches around the state and supported fundamentalist missionaries. Plecker belonged to a conservative Southern branch of the church that believed the Bible was infallible and condone d segregation. Members of Pleckers branch maintained that God flooded the earth and destroyed Sodom to express his anger at racial interbreeding.

Let us turn a deaf ear to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality, Plecker wrote in a 1925 essay.